Here’s an exercise in separating fundamentals from conventions: if we held a technical summit with all of the galaxy’s advanced alien civilizations, what would we find we had in common, and what would we find inscrutable?
Spoken language would be inscrutable. Different physiologies would lead to an inability to speak or even hear each others’ phonemes. Written language would be inscruible, though we might find analogs of nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
But mathematics would be shared. After translating syntax and symbols, we’d find we had exactly the same constructive axioms, and agree that other axioms are controversial. We’d have the same theorems and the same proofs. They’d rever a Pythagoras and a Leibniz.
Now we compare programming languages. We’d find some low level constructs have developed very differently. Maybe they’d have balanced tertiary numbers instead of twos-complement and u-law fractional numbers instead of floating point. Our bitwise ops may have no analog.
So, let’s ask: what parts of programming would we have in common? We’d share the mathematical integers, and data structures analogous to Cartesian products (structs) and sums (unions), and functions with side effects, and pure functions as a special case.
We’d have transactions as a way of running concurrent operations atomically. We’d have most of Knuth’s algorithms in common (maybe they’d have some major breakthroughs we lack!)
The goal of a high level programming language is to be something that we and these alien civilizations could agree on as universal and principled, and free of quirks and arbitrarity.
